"This is really stupid" is not a good reason to reject an idea, because there have been obviously idiotic ideas which have turned out to be right.

If you want to reject an idea you have to show that it's wrong. Showing that it's the work of an imbecile is rewarding but unnecessary.

The idea here is that the mind is self aware and occupies the body, but the body is an automaton, running strictly on whatever programming biology has, and on instinct. The mind thinks it controls the body but is deluded. The body has no awareness and the mind doesn't control it or influence it in any way. The mind thinks that whatever the body does is its idea and somehow manages to reconcile that with the obvious reality, which is that nothing it wants to do ever happens.

This is a real idea and people believe it.

I'll back up for a second. That's something you can do if you have a mind, and I think the major difference between creatures which are aware, like dogs, and ones which are also intelligent like humans, is that the intelligent ones can say, "Where was I?" and back their thoughts up to that point.

So let me go back before the start and explain how not to approach problems you have no idea about.

Saying that if you can't explain something it's not real is the lamest form of scientific theorizing. It's a cop-out, it's giving up, and it makes you look stupid. It makes you look very stupid. It makes you look like a self-satisfied clod who nobody can get through to. People shake their heads behind your back.

This is a lot like the early days of science, when people knew nothing and any explanation would do, when logic hadn't penetrated to scientific enquiries and you could wave your hands and make up nonsense, when bad air was an explanation for disease and heat was a liquid and matter did things because it wanted to.

That's understandable, if you're the kind of person who doesn't get logic or thought, but if you're studying science you should try. We know that because we've spent a couple of centuries figuring out how to understand stuff and it's not by making shit up and concocting ideas that let you ignore extremely obvious facts.

You should at the least know that you should try to do better. You should at least pretend.

Remember this magic mantra: "We don't know yet but we are working on it." It's like a big rake with long teeth that you can use to gather up pointless and stupid theories and take them in the back yard and burn them.

Now you don't know any more than you did, but you have an uncluttered space to think in without idiotic bullshit falling on your otherwise unoccupied head.

So is the mind a deluded phantasm riding a mindless automaton with no controls?

If we assume that's a reasonable theory, we have a number of interesting questions.

The most important one is, "Why does the mind exist at all?"

How does evolution work on something that has no effect on the real world? If the mind doesn't control the body then it can have no effect on its survival, so it doesn't exist to evolution. Why did the body create (which means evolve) something which in no way can possibly benefit it?

It can't. That means the mind came about in some other way. But there are two ways things can exist: life can make them, or they can occur naturally.

If life didn't create minds they occur naturally. That brings us, inevitably, to panpsychism. If something exists which couldn't have evolved it must exist in things which aren't alive. It must be everywhere so it can be in us, because if we don't make it we're not privileged in that respect.

This means it's just as likely that deer and trees are just as conscious as us, and maybe milk cartons and rocks, because nobody has offered, or possibly could, any other explanation for what's really going on.

It also follows that the mind inhabiting a rock must be sitting going, "No, I'm not moving, ever." We've already established that the mind deludes itself into believing it controls the body, so it seems inevitable that minds occupying other things do the same. There must be rocks that believe they've obstinately done nothing for billions of years.

We can't deny that the same may be true for molecules and atoms.

There is another possibility. One could theorize that there are inanimate spirits floating around everywhere and when you're born one of them latches onto you and doesn't realize that it has no control and the whole life thing is a scam. I'm leery of any philosophy which requires me to call God either an idiot (creationism), hapless puppet of the church (Papal infallibility) or a con man (this.)

You could say that there are inanimate spirits without the intervention of a divinity, but then you're making up a deranged religion and not trying to be logical.

The next question is, how can we discuss consciousness if the only part of us capable of speaking isn't conscious? The idea says that the mind exists and rides the body but controls nothing, thinks it does and can discuss that idea with other minds even though it's just a passive observer. The body is doing the talking but isn't conscious that it's doing that, and the mind thinks it is but isn't, but the discussion takes place seamlessly. The body has long conversations about consciousness, something it's never experienced or even imagined because it can't imagine stuff and doesn't have experiences, but it talks about experiences and imagination. The mind, which knows these things because they're all it is or has, has nothing to do with the conversation but it's so true to its experiences that it thinks it's doing the talking.

Let me sum that up: the body is just an automaton and yet can discuss philosophical matters, specifically consciousness, even though it has none, and the mind can't, even though it is conscious, because that's absolutely all it is. Our unconscious bodies have discussions about something that to all intents and purposes doesn't exist.

Miraculously our minds do exist but they don't know that there's anything wrong. This incredibly bizarre and unlikely state of affairs happened by accident, because the mind doesn't affect anything, ever. It can't communicate with other minds even though it thinks it is, and the body can but can't possibly have anything to say about consciousness because it has none.

It's so stupid that ... Jesus.

Let's look at question three: how does the mind have memories?

The mind can remember things that happened in the past. The mind goes away when you sleep, or when you're anaesthetized, knocked out, passed out drunk, or a number of other things. If memory persists in the absence of a mind it must be physical.

That means that when the mind accesses memories it's affecting the real world. The mind has some control over reality.

The mind also stores memories which the body can access, because it can discuss experiences it can't have but can remember. This is an odd claim, but it follows from the idea.

We could suggest that there are two sets of memories, one for the mind and one for the body, but in that case they wouldn't match, and the body couldn't discuss philosophy and experience.

There might only be one set of memories, those kept by the body, and the mind could remember them but not add to them. That would mean the mind would be conscious but wouldn't be able to remember ever having been conscious before, which would be disconcerting for the mind. Also we know from experience that this is not the case.

Again, you could concoct a pseudo-religious scheme where disembodied spirits rode the body and saved their own memories, went away during periods of unconsciousness and came back when the body woke up, whatever that means to an automaton, and somehow reconciled their memories from moment to moment with the ones the body kept. This runs into the problem we notice repeatedly. The mind, which is in this scheme nothing but thoughts, would in all of these cases be unable to control its thoughts but it would never notice.

So there are at the very least two ways in which the body affects reality: it can make and access memories, and it can converse with other minds in other bodies.

That's enough to demolish this whole idea. Consciousness does affect reality.

The response from people who believe this nonsensical idea would be, if they were thinking, "How does the mind affect the real world?"

Nobody knows, and it's a problem nobody's given a lot of thought to, but it very obviously does, and if you try to create a scheme where it doesn't the whole thing collapses into contradictions and drivel.

The mind does affect reality, so we should start thinking about how it does that.

Any explanation has to account for four things: the mind doesn't just control the body and collapse quantum waveforms. It's also conscious and it thinks. All of these are very likely to be manifestations of the same basic thing.

I think there are a few possibilities:

1. The mind is like a soap bubble, delicate and hard to make. The brain makes one and somehow watches what it thinks and puts those desires into action. I think this is unlikely, because it would mean it's not the mind affecting reality but the brain doing that on the mind's behalf. We know that the mind can collapse the quantum wave and thus change reality, so this postulates two different mechanisms, which seems unlikely. Also I think consciousness is a basic feature of reality and isn't complicated or hard for a mind to use.
2. The mind controls the collapse macroscopically, and it steers reality toward a desired outcome on a large scale - the mind collapses the quantum wave to a desired result and the body has to do whatever that scenario calls for. That's too much like the mind being strictly an observer because it would require the mind not to notice that it was getting the results it wants but only in a general sense. This is not compatible with our experience of reality. That's hard to accept and I think for this reason that it's wrong. Also it would give other minds, which can also collapse the quantum wave, the ability to control our bodies. At the least it's a tortuous explanation.
3. The mind controls the quantum collapse at a very basic level, that of neurons. This assumes that the mind can affect things on a microscopic scale and use that to control nerves and thus muscles. In addition it can collapse the wave, and that suggests that controlling nerves works the same way.
4. Something else. The universe heavily depends on thought, and the mind obviously influences it in some way we haven't figured out yet. I think this has an element of truth, and it's not entirely inconsistent with 3. It doesn't explain how the mind both controls the body very precisely and collapses the quantum wave for large-scale events external to itself, but not understanding something doesn't, as above, mean it's not a possibility.